International Journal of Health Care Finance and Economics This is an RSS file. You can use it to subscribe to this data in your favourite RSS reader or to display this data on your own website or blog.

Determinants of prepaid systems of healthcare financing: a worldwide country-level perspective
AbstractIn this paper we examine determinants of prepaid modes of health care financing in a worldwide cross-country perspective. We use three different indicators to capture the role of prepaid modes in health care financing: (i) the share of total prepaid financing as percent of total current health expenditures, (ii) the share of voluntary prepaid financing as percent of total prepaid financing, and (iii) the share of compulsory health insurance as percent of total compulsory prepaid financing. In the econometric analysis, we refer to a panel data set comprising 154 countries and covering the time period 2000 –2015. W...
Source: International Journal of Health Care Finance and Economics - March 31, 2021 Category: Health Management Source Type: research

Public –private differentials in health care delivery: the case of cesarean deliveries in Algeria
AbstractAkin to other developing countries, Algeria has witnessed an increasing role of the private health sector in the past two  decades. Our study sheds light on the public–private overlap and the phenomenon of physician dual practice in the provision of health care services using the particular case of cesarean deliveries in Algeria. Existing studies have reported that, compared to the public sector, delivering in a pri vate health facility increases the risk of enduring a cesarean section. While confirming this result for the case of Algeria, our study also reveals the existence of public–private differentials in...
Source: International Journal of Health Care Finance and Economics - March 30, 2021 Category: Health Management Source Type: research

Wealth and the utilization of long-term care services: evidence from the United States
AbstractLong-term care (LTC) provision and financing has become a major challenge for policymakers in the United States and worldwide. To inform associated policies and more efficiently allocate LTC resources, it is important to understand how demand for different types of LTC services responds to increased wealth. We use data from the United States Health and Retirement Study to examine the use of LTC services following plausibly exogenous positive shocks to wealth. We further account for time-invariant household-level characteristics, including the expectation of a wealth shock at an unknown future time, by employing hou...
Source: International Journal of Health Care Finance and Economics - March 30, 2021 Category: Health Management Source Type: research

Geographic variation in Part B reimbursement and physician offsetting behavior: a physician matching approach
AbstractHistorically, Medicare has operated under the assumption that providers respond to reductions in reimbursement through increased provision of services in an effort to offset declining practice revenue; however, some recent empirical work examining fee reductions has found evidence of either small offsetting effects or reductions in the quantity supplied. Using a distance matching approach that matches practices to nearby practices that are subject to different reimbursement rates, we find overall evidence in support of Medicare ’s offsetting assumption collectively for all services and for evaluation and manageme...
Source: International Journal of Health Care Finance and Economics - March 18, 2021 Category: Health Management Source Type: research

Cost-efficiency in the patient centered medical home model: New evidence from federally qualified health centers
AbstractThis research analyzes the cost-efficiency of the Patient Centered Medical Home (PCMH) model vis- à-vis the traditional care delivery model in the Federally Qualified Health Centers (FQHC). We apply the three-stage least squares modeling approach on 2014 UDS data on all FQHCs to estimate per-visit and per-patient cost functions. Log-quadratic and linear-quadratic functional forms of cost are us ed for the analysis. The estimated models reveal substantial scale economies and cost advantages associated with PCMH status. Aggregate cost-saving impact of PCMH across all FQHCs in 2014 is estimated to be $1.05 billion. S...
Source: International Journal of Health Care Finance and Economics - February 27, 2021 Category: Health Management Source Type: research

The association of insurance plan characteristics with physician patient-sharing network structure
AbstractProfessional and social connections among physicians impact patient outcomes, but little is known about how characteristics of insurance plans are associated with physician patient-sharing network structure. We use information from commercially insured enrollees in the 2011 Massachusetts All Payer Claims Database to construct and examine the structure of the physician patient-sharing network using standard and novel social network measures. Using regression analysis, we examine the association of physician patient-sharing network measures with an indicator of whether a patient is enrolled in a health maintenance or...
Source: International Journal of Health Care Finance and Economics - February 26, 2021 Category: Health Management Source Type: research

Impact of community-based health insurance on utilisation of preventive health services in rural Uganda: a propensity score matching approach
AbstractThe effect of voluntary health insurance on preventive health has received limited research attention in developing countries, even when they suffer immensely from easily preventable illnesses. This paper surveys households in rural south-western Uganda, which are geographically serviced by a voluntary Community-based health insurance scheme, and applied propensity score matching to assess the effect of enrolment on using mosquito nets and deworming under-five children. We find that enrolment in the scheme increased the probability of using a mosquito net by 26% and deworming by 18%. We postulate that these finding...
Source: International Journal of Health Care Finance and Economics - February 10, 2021 Category: Health Management Source Type: research

Choice, quality and patients ’ experience: evidence from a Finnish physiotherapy service
AbstractWe study the relationship between patient choices and provider quality in a rehabilitation service for disabled patients who receive the service frequently but do not have access to quality information. Previous research has found a positive relationship between patient choices and provider quality in health services that patients typically do not have previous experience or use frequently. We contribute by examining choices of new patients and experienced patients who were either forced to switch or actively switched their provider. In the analysis, we combine register data on patients ’ choices and switches wit...
Source: International Journal of Health Care Finance and Economics - January 19, 2021 Category: Health Management Source Type: research

Socioeconomic inequality in tobacco use in Kenya: a concentration analysis
AbstractThis paper aims at assessing and exploring socioeconomic inequalities in tobacco use in Kenya. Using the theory of fundamental causes, and concentration index, we investigate the determinants of tobacco use, and whether it disproportionately affects the poor. All data used in this study emanated from the 2014 Global Adult Tobacco Survey implemented in Kenya on a nationally representative sample of men and women aged 15  years and older. Our results suggest a link between tobacco use and socioeconomic inequality. Overall, poorer households are more affected by tobacco use than richer households. This socioeconomic ...
Source: International Journal of Health Care Finance and Economics - January 4, 2021 Category: Health Management Source Type: research

Do companies in the pharmaceutical supply chain earn excess returns?
AbstractRising drug spending has led to increased calls to curtail drug costs. However, it is unclear where to target policy solutions. We estimated excess returns (the extent to which a firm ’s profits are higher than expected given the risk associated with their investments) for manufacturers and middlemen in the pharmaceutical supply chain to determine who is making excessive profits. Excess returns were calculated as the difference between return on invested capital and the expecte d returns given risk, which is known as the weighted average cost of capital. We compared excess returns for manufacturers and middlemen ...
Source: International Journal of Health Care Finance and Economics - January 4, 2021 Category: Health Management Source Type: research

Implementation of personalized medicine in a context of moral hazard and uncertainty about treatment efficacy
AbstractThis paper analyzes the decision of a health authority to implement personalized medicine. We consider a model in which the health authority has three possibilities. It can apply either the same treatment (a standard or a new treatment) to the whole population or implement personalized medicine, i.e., use genetic information to offer the most suitable treatment to each patient. We first characterize the drug reimbursement contract of a firm producing a new treatment with a companion genetic test when the firm can undertake an effort to improve drug quality. Then, we determine the conditions under which personali...
Source: International Journal of Health Care Finance and Economics - November 17, 2020 Category: Health Management Source Type: research

Growth and welfare in mixed health system financing with physician dual practice in a developing economy: a case of Indonesia
AbstractBased on Indonesia ’s hybridBPJS Kesehatan health system, we analyze for welfare-optimal government financing strategy in an economy with a mixed health system using an endogenous growth framework with physician dual practice. We find the model solution to produce two vastly different regimes in terms of policy implications: a “high” public-sector congestion regime as in the benchmark case of Indonesia, and a “low” public-sector congestion, high capacity regime. In the former, welfare-optimal health financing strategy appears to be promoting private health service. In contrast, in the low-congestion, high...
Source: International Journal of Health Care Finance and Economics - November 7, 2020 Category: Health Management Source Type: research

From downcoding to upcoding: DRG based payment in hospitals
AbstractA prospective disease group-based payment is a reimbursement rule used in a wide array of countries. It turns to be the hospital ’s payment rule to imply. The secret of this payment is a fee payment as well as a hospital’s activity based payment. There is a consensus to consider this rule of payment as the least likely to be manipulated by the actors. However, the defined fee per group depends on recorded information that is then processed using complex algorithms. What if the data itself can be manipulated? The result would be a fee per group based on manipulated factors that would lead to an inefficient budge...
Source: International Journal of Health Care Finance and Economics - October 31, 2020 Category: Health Management Source Type: research

National health insurance and the choice of delivery facility among expectant mothers in Ghana
This study used data from the 2014 to 2008 Ghana Demographic and Health Surveys with a sample of 6319 women and employed multinomial endogenous treatment effects models with Conditional Mixed Process estimator to examine the effects of national health insurance scheme (NHIS) on the choice delivery facility in Ghana. We found that NHIS has varied effects on the use of delivery services across service providers in the health system. Relative to home delivery services, being insured increases the probability of using public hospitals, public clinics and private health facilities for delivery by 20.3 percent, 9.1 percent and 2...
Source: International Journal of Health Care Finance and Economics - October 30, 2020 Category: Health Management Source Type: research

Asymmetric behavior of tobacco consumption in Spain across the business cycle: a long-term regional analysis
This article explores the relationship and its pathways in 16 Spanish regions for the period 1989 –2018. To this end, we apply a Granger causality analysis based on the augmented vector autoregressive (VAR) model in levels and extra lags. This method provides more efficient and robust results than the standard VAR model, which can lead to biased results with limited samples, especially in a re gion-by-region analysis. The empirical results suggest that the impact of the business cycle on tobacco consumption is heterogeneous and specific to each region. In addition, although recession phases cause a decline in tobacco con...
Source: International Journal of Health Care Finance and Economics - October 5, 2020 Category: Health Management Source Type: research